Cindy Kleine's new film, PHYLLIS AND HAROLD, will be opening in New York, at Cinema Village on February 19, 2010. Phyllis And Harold is an astoundingly frank journey through a disastrous 59-year
marriage. Drawing on a lifetime of her family's home movies and interviews made over 12 years, filmmaker Cindy Kleine
mixes reportage, cinema verité and animation to uncover family secrets
and tell a story that could not be shown publicly as long as her father
was still alive.

Cindy Kleine is a film and video artist whose prolific career began when she was an undergraduate at The Museum School and at the legendary (and long-gone) MIT Film/Video Section, studying with Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus, and among a legion of future filmmakers in the program, including Ross McElwee, Robb Moss and John Gianvito. In line with Boston peers, Kleine has developed a central body of documentary work which are family dramas: camera visits with her grandmother and her sister, and intense probes of her parents' fifty-nine years of a dubious, fractured marriage. Additionally, Kleine has gone outside of family for films about odd artists and off-the-wall musicians; and she's gone inside herself for some deeply personal, poetically framed psychodramas about love lost, the spirit gained.

Kleine's films have been exhibited at many international Festivals, including at Telluride, Seattle, San Francisco, It's All True, Brazil, and Vancouver, and at such venues as The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Knitting Factory and Anthology Film Archives in NYC, The ICA in London and The Center d'art Contemporain in Lyon, France. Her film, Doug and Mike, Mike and Doug, about the artist Starn Twins, was broadcast on PBS's POV Film Series.

Ms. Kleine has received awards and fellowships from the Iowa Independent Film Festival (2008), The Jewish Eye Film Festival, Ashkelon, Israel (2009), The American Film Institute, The U.S. S-8 Film and Digital Video Festival, The MacDowell Colony (1986,88, and 2010), The Bard College MFA Fellowship Program, and The New England Regional Fellowship Program. She has taught filmmaking at Boston College, Harvard University, The Museum School, Boston, and The New School for Social Research. She lives with her husband, theatre director, actor, playwright and painter Andre Gregory, and their two cats, in New York City and on Cape Cod.

NYWIFT programs, screenings and events are supported, in part, by grants from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.